


A Spectrum of Natural Pigments (Nine Colours for Tissaia and Yennefer)

by galeaspida



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Colours and Pigments and Dyes Oh My, Expanding on canon, F/F, Snapshots, emotional journey, naturally
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 04:48:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29129796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galeaspida/pseuds/galeaspida
Summary: A series of short chapters linking natural pigments and dyes with moments in Tissaia and Yennefer's lives. Eventual Tissaia/Yennefer in later chapters.
Relationships: Tissaia de Vries/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 24
Kudos: 45





	1. Onion Skin Yellow

**Author's Note:**

> This was written half a year ago, and I'm going to post a segment at a time because I need a break from the mental gymnastics of creating a cohesive long-chaptered fic that 'Unleashed' has become. 
> 
> Ty for a last-minute beta by twentyfivehamsters.
> 
> tw: mentions of physical abuse.

On the day of Yennefer’s sixteenth naming day, which is also the night of Beltane, her mother gives her a wool kirtle in a cheery yellow. She had watched her mother dye the dress in between the chores and the children-minding; setting two buckets of dried onion skins to boil in the largest cooking pot over the fire, leaving the linens to soak as they chopped potatoes and carrots for the evening meal. A bucket of stale cow urine fixed the colour into permanency the following day before it had been washed out in the village pond with the rest of the laundry. The garment is repurposed from her mother’s own meager collection of clothing, and a little bit too large for Yennefer’s rake-thin body, but it’s new to her and therefore treasured.

Yennefer is sixteen now, the age when most maidens have arrangements to wed, or have wed. She is a woman by the law of Aedirn, expected to have a future of bearing children, tending hearth and home, and make pretty kirtles to give to her daughters.

The day she receives her yellow kirtle also the same day Yennefer learns that flowers can be used to make doors into other places.

\---

It has been three nights since her first brush with magic and Yennefer is beginning to feel that the boy in the cave of skulls had only been a dream. She _had_ hit her head on the ground after Druneille had pushed her, and thinks that it could have been just a hazy memory like the ones she gets when she gets cuffed for doing something Father doesn't like and her ears ring for hours. 

Word has spread that Druneille and Nikolas had seen the pig-farmer's hunchbacked daughter disappear into thin air. Yennefer was punished severely by Father when she couldn't explain what had happened in the barn, and had been ordered, bruised and sore, to stay inside the house, out of sight and out of mind. Strange occurrences don’t sit well with the farm folk of Vengerberg - the recent wars are still fresh in memory, where differences were enough to burn farms down, heedless of what or who might be trapped inside.

The question of what is to become of Yennefer is obviously on her parents' minds, too, if the hushed conversations by the fire are any indication, the gloomy glances when Yennefer makes a noise above a whisper. Her physical deformities are too prominent to offer any hope of attracting a husband, and the meager dowry of a suckling pig or two is likely not enough to turn the head of even the most desperate of unwedded men. And Yennefer - desperately, _deeply_ \- wants to mean more to someone than what quantity of livestock or bags of goods will be sent with her.

So Yennefer’s resigned herself to years of living with her family, growing old and more physically twisted, vainly hoping for a dashing figure to come save her from a life of loneliness. She knew the stories - of scullery maids rescued from dusty hearths and whisked away to beautiful balls, destined to meet and marry a handsome prince.

Yennefer would settle for anyone who loved her.

—

The nip of the morning chill is sharp against Yennefer’s bare legs as she hobbles to the pig pen with a heavy bucket full of slops bumping against her thigh. She’s trailed by a dozen eager chickens and the pungent smell of decomposing onions. It’s mostly chopped turnips and the peelings from yesterday's supper of potatoes and leeks, with some moldy old bread she found in a sack and soaked overnight in stale goat’s milk. 

Yennefer is newly determined to show that she is able to look after the farm on her own, that she can be _useful_ beyond minding the fire and cooking and cleaning. She’s up before the sun peeks over the roof of the barn, stoking the fire, starting the morning porridge, and out to the pen, intent on feeding the piglets bound for the weekend market before her father can tell her not to. 

But Yennefer is unlucky; her father wakes up earlier than expected, and her plans for morning chores are upended along with the heavy bucket. The ground is cold and wet, and Yennefer’s clean yellow kirtle is decidedly less cheery when covered in slop and shit-soaked mud. 

The inevitable punishment for willfully disobeying Father is interrupted by the arrival of a single-horse cart on the road from the village; the horse’s hooves clattering noisily on the crushed rock as it trots briskly to the edge of their land before coming to a neat stop. 

Yennefer’s father stands up straight, like he does when he's bargaining with a customer at market, hand on his belt, shoulders back, trying to look taller than he actually is. Yennefer stares too, because the driver of the cart is a woman, and unlike any person she’s ever seen.

The woman jumps down lightly from the seat and walks towards the pen, her clothing billowing out behind her in the breeze. She’s beautifully dressed in a rich red cloak with soft-looking fur lining the wide hood, and Yennefer’s first thought is that she’s one of the wealthy merchants from the city, shopping for wool at the local market. As she approaches, Yennefer knows instinctively that this woman _isn’t_ a merchant. There is something in her sharp face, the set of the small mouth, the faint upward tilt to her eyes, that reminds Yennefer of their old barn cat - the silent, sleek-coated one that had cleared the farm of rodents and then disappeared two winters ago. 

Yennefer’s curiosity about the visitor is tempered by the unpleasant sensation of cold muck leaching into her shift, and she shakes some of it off her hand, grimacing at the stains on the sleeves of her woolen smock. The piglets snuffle around her, looking for the choicest bits of food in the mess, ignorant of their part in all this and of their eventual fate, even as the woman asks Father their price. 

It only really registers what is happening when Yennefer watches coins ( _four_ copper marks, the same as for a small bag of salt, or two chickens, or a sack of onions late in the season) being dropped into a waiting hand, and she hears the word ‘witch’ whispered by her mother.

Yennefer’s world cracks like a fallen mirror.

(What had the boy in the cave said before he’d pushed her back through the door in the air three days ago? _She will be coming for you?_ )

Terrified, her heart fluttering in her chest like a songbird trapped against a glass window, Yennefer screams out for the one person who loves her, but it is in vain. Her mother - tired and scared and defeated - cannot help her daughter, and the father-who-isn’t will not. Yennefer was unwanted, after all, always lesser than her half-siblings, a crooked reminder of her mother’s dalliance before this cruel man, birthed just soon enough after their marriage that the village wives whispered about how a child could have survived such an early birth.

As Father wrestles a vainly-struggling Yennefer past the gate and shoves her to the ground, away from her mother and her brothers and her sisters - she has a better view of the one who has bought her for four coins. The woman is even smaller than she’d looked from a distance, and her beautiful porcelain face is expressionless, but her very presence is unsettling, because there is _more_ to her than her delicate body. Yennefer feels like a juicy mouse, out in the open and unable to run to shelter.

‘Come, Girl,’ the woman-who-might-be-a-witch says, turning on her heel, making her way towards the horse and cart, clearly expecting Yennefer to follow after her.

(Yennefer can only rely on herself, it seems.)

‘You can’t take me!’ she cries out, planting her feet and straightening up as much as her crooked back will allow. 

Yennefer watches the beautifully-dressed woman stop in place, perfectly still, and her voice quavers as she finishes with a choked, ‘I _won’t_ go.’

There is a dreadful pause and then the woman turns around to fully face Yennefer. Her blue eyes are very clear in the morning sun, and a rising sense of dread threatens to overwhelm her. 

_**COME.** _

The cold _blow_ of force from that single word echoes in Yennefer’s mind like a church bell. Her vision turns into spots of white light and the wave of dizziness swallows every thought of defiance whole.

She feels herself walking forwards, towards the cart and the horse, away from her mother and only home Yennefer has ever known.


	2. Indigo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> TW: references to self-harm
> 
> I'm stretching the span of time that Yennefer was at Aretuza before that first class to a full week.
> 
> Any mistakes are my own. Twentyfivehamsters caught others.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The properties of indigo are greatly exaggerated for plot, and there are serious systemic side effects, if my spiral into the peer-reviewed literature is any indication. You, my clever reader, are not to self-medicate based on things you read on the internet.

When the door closes with a firm click behind the woman who had called herself Rectoress, Yennefer curls up into a ball on the thin sheets and dissolves into great blubbery tears. The narrow cot is hard on her bony body and her wrists ache under their wrappings, but nothing hurts more than her wrung-out heart inside the empty cavity of her chest. The abject misery of her life has been mocked yet again - sold by the one she called Father, abandoned by her mother, soon to be forgotten by her brothers and sisters. And she’d even failed in her attempt to end it all, foiled by the woman - the _witch_ \- who had bought her for a pittance. 

As it turns out, she has little time to feel sorry for herself. A scant number of minutes pass before the wooden door opens again and a white-haired woman in a starched apron marches in and announces that Yennefer is to be bathed. 

When Yennefer refuses, the woman grips her sloping shoulder and pulls her to her feet.

‘It was not a request, girl. You’re absolutely filthy - one would think you’d been rolling around in a pig pen. Now, hop to it!’

They walk up three flights of stairs at a brisk pace. Yennefer’s panting after the first - but it doesn’t stop her from asking questions of the servant. She learns little in return; the castle they are in is called Aretuza, it is a school where sorceresses are trained to use magic, and Tissaia de Vries is the Rectoress, which is a title.

‘And you’ll mind the Rectoress if you know what’s good for you, girl,’ the woman warns as they come to the landing of a narrow hall. ‘She won’t ask you twice.’ 

She produces a narrow silver key from her skirts and strides over to the first door on the right. With a click of the lock the door swings open, and the strong miasma of fermenting plant matter hits Yennefer’s nostrils and sends her into a coughing fit. The room inside is lit by narrow windows, and the far wall is lined with five wooden tubs - each larger than her mother’s washbasin. Narrow strands of rope are strung from wall to wall like laundry lines, high up, almost to the very ceiling, which stands almost twenty feet above them. Yennefer has little time to stare because before she can protest, she is marched to the nearest of the basins, stripped of her smock and kirtle by insistent hands, and thrust unceremoniously into the filled tub. 

The water is tepid, and Yennefer goes to push herself out only to hear the crack of a sharp warning to keep her wrapped wrists clear of the water. Rucking up her own sleeves, the woman picks up a boar-bristle brush and a bar of soap, and sets to scrubbing Yennefer as if she’s a stain on the floorboards. Her hair may be white but she is frighteningly strong, and there’s no escaping her firm grip and Yennefer’s squirming only makes the woman brush harder. 

Yennefer emerges from the tub like a newborn fawn; weak-legged, pink-skinned, and shivering, only to be pounced on again and vigorously dried with a thick towel until her breath is pressed out of her. 

The soaking towel is tossed over the nearest of the lines hanging from the wall, and Yennefer finds herself forced down onto a low stool. Brandishing a comb and scissors, the woman turns to her with a grim look on her face. It takes only a few tugs of the comb before Yennefer’s scalp aches even more than her wrists, and her eyes are blurring with tears. Desperate for distraction she looks at the nearest of the other large tubs, and is surprised to see blue cloth soaking in dark liquid. The sharp scent of fermenting organic material still cuts through the smell of the soap. It’s _dye_ , Yennefer realizes, but one she doesn’t recognize - not the paler blue of the woad plant that she knows. She doesn’t understand why a school for magic would go to the mess and trouble of making its own dyes, particularly when it could simply buy the fabric for far less trouble.

‘What are you soaking in the vats?’

‘Clothing, girl,’ the woman snorts. ‘The Rectoress didn’t want you to go to the baths in the state you were in - you’d dirty up the whole place. I had a spare tub here and offered it up, and I’m regretting now, seeing the mess that was caked on you. Now hold still, unless you want to lose an ear to the clippers - my eyes aren’t what they used to be.’

\---

Yennefer is deposited - scrubbed, shorn, and sore - back in the room that is to become her own. There is no sign of the onion-skin-yellow kirtle, but neatly folded on top of the cot’s blanket are a pale linen underdress and a long surcote made of a beautiful green-blue silk that shines in the candlelight. 

The fabric is almost too pretty to touch, and Yennefer tentatively runs her forefinger along the smooth surface. She dresses carefully, but all the tugging in the world doesn’t let the surcote sit well on her uneven shoulders. It’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever held, let alone worn.

Does this mean that she is to be a sorceress?

\---

Yennefer is allowed to explore the castle, or rather, she isn’t told _not_ to, and so she leaves her room and walks up and down the stairs and corridors, learning the pattern of the halls. She’d been brought here in darkness after all - a dozen miserable hours sitting in the back of the horse-drawn cart - and wants the measure of this cage she’s been placed in.

There are other girls here, though Yennefer keeps her distance, even when a tall, dark-eyed girl about her own age smiles at her from across the corridor.

She hears something about two more students arriving soon from a pair of passing servants, their arms full of fresh bedding, heading towards rooms at the end of the hall. 

Yennefer eventually finds herself outside on a balcony near the highest level, winded by the climb, and has to blink at the sudden light of open air and afternoon sun. It’s immediately apparent that she is far, far away from the valleys and rolling hills of Aedirn. Everything beyond the stone balcony is blue-green water and sea mist and a narrow rope bridge that pierces the fog into nothingness. The ocean is so much larger than the village pond and much deeper than she can take in. She leans her body over the stone railing, breasts pressed against the smooth marble, stretching out to look at the waves crashing white against the cliffs hundreds of feet down.

(If she were to lean just a little further, she would tip off the edge like a clay cup knocked from a table and be shattered on the black rocks below.)

Yennefer watches the water churn until her head spins from the constant motion and she has to sit down near the castle wall to steady herself, suddenly weaker than she’s ever felt. The blood she’d lost during the night had been significant - and her legs have given out from under her. Even with her eyes closed the air smells wet and salty and there is the constant clamouring of white-backed gulls wheeling over the waves, rising and falling with the breeze. 

In time, the spots in her field of vision fade, and the dizziness passes, and Yennefer can crawl on hands and knees to look down through the spaces between the railings. She gazes down at the rolling sea for hours, sitting on the ground, her forehead pressed against cold carved stone. Minutes turn to hours, and the afternoon sun burns away the fog, and she can spot the distant ruin of another narrow tower out beyond the waves, no more than a quarter mile away, surrounded by the screaming seabirds. 

_The Tower of the Gull._

The memory comes back into sudden focus. The tall boy from the cave - _Istredd_ , that had been his name - had said it to her, but she hadn’t remembered until now.

 _‘You can trust me’_ he had said before he’d helped her flee, using the white flower he’d pressed to his lips.

Yennefer doesn’t think she’ll ever trust anyone.

\---

She is woken up on the second morning by the straight-backed form of Rectoress de Vries looming over her. Yennefer stays silent. The woman is wearing a different gown with a fitted bodice - a deep green with gold trim. 

Yennefer watches as the Rectoress unrolls the bandages with deft fingers, inspects the wounds, purses her lips, and replaces the gauze with fresh linen wraps. She leaves as quietly as she had arrived. 

—

There are gardens on the highest floors of the castle - near the room with the tubs of dye - protected by glass barriers thin enough to allow the sunlight through, trapping the heat until the air inside is stifling. One of the rooms is filled with low-growing shrubs that Yennefer doesn't recognize - a deep green - with firm stalks and smooth pinnate leaves. The earth they are growing in is a rich loam, comparable to the best of Aedirn’s fertile soils. 

Yennefer knows something about plants, having grown up hoeing and picking and watering. She suspects she’d be happiest curled under the soil, hidden from view and covered.

(She also suspects she would be the bruised, rotting vegetable, thrown away so as not to spoil the rest of the harvest).

Yennefer unthinkingly sinks her hand into the warm soil, and then regrets it, because the pale linen wrappings are now dusted with dirt. It takes her a painstaking amount of time to clean it off. Even when she has, there’s still a stain to the cloth. 

\---

On the third morning, the bandages are unwrapped to reveal spreading redness to the deepest of the wounds on her left wrist. This is enough to spark careful examination of all the cuts. She keeps as quiet as she can when the cool fingers unwind the wrappings and press on the closing edges of the healing tissue. 

Once the Rectoress has satisfied herself that the inflammation is limited to the one side - Yennefer's left wrist is wetted with a bottled tincture, followed by a poultice of crushed leaves. It’s clear the woman is very concerned with cleanliness.

‘What is that?’ Yennefer asks when the first leaves are pressed against her skin, and the familiar scent of plant matter reaches her nostrils.

‘Indigo.’

‘Is it magic?’

‘No, Piglet,’ the woman sniffs. ‘The plant has anti-inflammatory properties. Aretuza grows its own supply - cultured from the same stock as when the school was first built.’ She indicates Yennefer’s blue kirtle with the faintest tilt of her well-shaped head. ‘The acolytes of Aretuza are dressed in indigo out of respect for the traditional role of sorceresses, which was to be healers of the highest order.’ 

She finishes binding Yennefer’s wrist - snug, but not too tight - and picks up the wooden bowl and discarded linens, before fixing Yennefer with a look. 

‘Keep that clean lest you lose your arm to infection. No more rooting around in the dirt.’

'Is this because my father was part elf? The _magic_ , I mean?’

Yennefer watches as the woman stops in the door, shoulders suddenly taut, spine stiff. When the Rectoress slowly turns back around, her beautiful face is expressionless.

'A word of advice, Piglet,' she says crisply. 'Do not be so eager to let slip the details of your blood. It is a weapon to be used against you, and a _sharp_ one at that. You’ve enough of an enemy in yourself.'

\---

There are several rooms in the castle that are larger than the village church she’d grown up with. The first is a great hall, decorated by tapestries of the same colour of silk cloth that her own surcote is dyed with. The glittering dark floor is flecked by metallic sheen, and decorated with all sorts of fanciful shapes of animals and horrifying creatures. Yennefer circles around each gold-lined figure, her eyes wide and wondering. 

Nearby, on the same level, is an equally large room filled with books from floor to ceiling, all carefully slotted into specific sections bookcases. Yennefer doesn’t dare to touch anything lest she draw attention to herself. She can’t read, and has only ever seen books at the market fair when she was younger, being sold for heavy bags of gold coins. 

—

Her dressings are checked daily, always at first light, when Yennefer is bleary-eyed and half-awake and sour. 

‘I can do this on my own,’ she grumbles the fourth morning, even as she holds up her wrist as steady as she is able.

The woman does not pause in her wrapping. When both bandages are neatly tied, she meets Yennefer’s eyes with her own blue gaze.

‘Very well, Piglet.’

\---

Yennefer finds the stables tucked behind the castle while exploring after supper. There are milking cows and goats in a large pen, and a number of chickens and ducks scattered around the dirt yard. 

There are horses too - though they are kept further inside, and after the stable-hands leave for their supper, Yennefer moves into the stable as quietly as she can, her mind half made up to take a horse and ride off into the deep twilight. 

(She doesn’t in the end. Yennefer is stubborn, but not stupid, and she knows that she is caught quite firmly in this gilded snare, and that she will not be allowed to escape. And where would she go? And how would she hide?)

The sweet-smelling hay and the familiar warmth of animals is oddly soothing. Yennefer wanders down the line of the horses, petting the ones that poke their heads out, scratching the spots on their heads that they can’t reach; behind the ears, under the chin, the wide space between the jawbones. An elegant blood-bay mare near the end of the stables is the sweetest - and after relieving her the carrot that she’d scrounged from her supper the night before, hangs her head to allow Yennefer to comb her stiff fingers through her forelock until the hair is as smooth as silk.

—

The Rectoress hasn’t come to Yennefer’s room for two days now, but fresh supplies are waiting for her on the table when she wakes. 

Yennefer changes the dressings - albeit slowly and awkwardly, her hands are weak and the tendons of her wrists pull with each tug of a finger - and tells herself that it’s her own choice, not because she’s been _told_ to. 

Even without the morning visits, the woman remains a cold constant of Yennefer’s life. She slices through the shafts of light lining the corridors as Yennefer hobbles by; an angled and all-seeing presence. Her pristine gowns are elegant creations, varied in cut but all of them made in blues and greens flecked with gold. She _glows_ against the dark walls of the school, the faint whisper of jewel-toned silk skirts as she walks, the tap of her heeled shoes an ominous portent. 

Yennefer tugs at her new kirtle, pulling the shiny cloth smooth to press out a wrinkle, as she passes by the woman. Her own garment is of a similar greenish-blue, the colour the deep waters of the ocean in sunlight, the waters she watches each morning from the highest balcony, but the mockery her twisted body makes of the tailoring of the fine fabric bites into her. 

It’s like comparing a farm duck dabbing in a mud puddle with a gliding swan on a lake. 

\---

The final two girls arrive on the sixth day.

The first arrives in a carriage drawn by two chestnut horses, gold-gilt and gleaming. A pretty girl wearing a beautiful silk gown in a buttery yellow emerges from inside, and steps daintily down the stairs. She is greeted at the entrance of the castle by a bald man in long robes, who embraces her like a daughter. Or at least this is how Yennefer imagines parents who love their children do.

Hours later, a single-horse buggy arrives at the cusp of sunset, and a sour-faced girl with pale skin and smooth golden hair in a long plait jumps out and strides towards the castle without a look back at the equally sour-faced man who brought her. 

\---

Yennefer wakes to the knock on the door on the morning of the seventh day at Aretuza. It’s a servant, and she’s been sent to take Yennefer to the greenhouses. 

‘The Rectoress is waiting.’

Seven girls in blue-green gowns are waiting at desks when she arrives.


End file.
